US drone strikes in Pakistan have risen from one a year in 2004 to one every four days under President Obama. Despite all the evidence of civilian deaths, the US insists drone strikes are 'the most accurate weapon in history'.
AlJazeera
18 July 2011
BBC's Newsnight reports on the civilian casualties the US says never happened. The report cited in the film can be downloaded from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) date to the maiden flight of the now-familiar Predator drones in 1994. After 9/11 the United States became addicted to the Predator and its successor, the Reaper.
Today the Air Force and CIA have at least 7,000 UAVs in service around the world, representing the biggest and most visible presence of the US military in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. This trend is likely to accelerate. As of March 2011 the US Air Force was training more remote drone "pilots" than those for conventional planes. Next year the Pentagon wants $5 billion just for drones.
Drones are getting smaller and more numerous. "One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill," according to The New York Times. "There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although plenty get lost." More on this later.
It's easy to see why generals and politicians are so enthusiastic. The pilotless planes, guided by operators manning a joystick at military and pseudomilitary agencies such as CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and armed by Xe, the private contractor formerly called Blackwater, are relatively cheap. A Predator costs $4.5 million; an F-22 Raptor fighter jet runs $150 million a unit.
Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, cites the "three Ds". Drones are "dull" because they can patrol empty stretches of barren land 24 hours a day. They're "dirty" because they can fly in and out of toxic clouds, including radiation.
Most appealingly, they are "dangerous" because the absence of a pilot eliminates the risk that a pilot - they cost millions to train - will be killed or captured by enemy forces. UAVs exploit the element of surprise: though relatively unobtrusive, they fire supersonic armor-piercing Hellfire missiles capable of striking a target as far as five miles away.
"People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying," The New Yorker magazine reported in 2009.
'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.) [Bleeding] human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'"
According to the Pentagon, drones hit their targets with 95 percent accuracy. The problematic question is: who are their targets? Thousands of people have been rubbed out by drones since 9/11. Press accounts document between 1,400 and 2,300 extrajudicial killings by allied forces, mostly in the Tribal Areas adjacent to Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. According to media reports cited by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, at least 957 Pakistanis were murdered by American drones in 134 airstrikes during the year 2010 alone. Since the media only learns about a fraction of these "secret" killings, the real number must be many times higher.)
Drone attacks illegal, unethical
Since the Pakistani government does not officially acknowledge, much less authorize, such attacks, they are illegal acts of war.
Political philosopher Michael Walzer asked in 2009: "Under what code does the CIA operate? I don't know. There should be a limited, finite group of people who are targets, and that list should be publicly defensible and available. Instead, it's not being publicly defended. People are being killed, and we generally require some public justification when we go about killing people."
Legal or not, Christine Fair of Georgetown University says the US doesn't use drone planes indiscriminately: "You have lawyers, you have targeteers, you have intelligence operatives, you actually have pilots who are manning the drones. These are not 14-year-old kids right out of basic training, playing around with a joystick," she told National Public Radio.
In the real world, it's often hard to tell the difference. There's no doubt that drone operators make mistakes. In April 2011, for example, two American marines were killed by a Predator in Afghanistan.
Of course, the majority of victims are local civilians. In Afghanistan and Pakistan drone strikes have killed countless children and wiped out so many wedding parties that it's become a sick joke. Estimates of the civilian casualty rate range from a third (by the New America Foundation) to 98 percent (terrorism expert Amir Mir). There is no evidence that a single "terrorist" has ever been killed by a drone - only the say-so of US and NATO spokesmen.
Errors are inherent due to the principal feature of the technology: remoteness. Manned aerial warfare is notoriously inaccurate; pilots zooming close to the speed of sound tens of thousands of feet above the ground have little idea who or what they're shooting at. Drone operators have even less information than old-school pilots. Like a submariner peering out of a periscope, they are supposed to decide whether people live or die based on fuzzy images through layers of glass. They call it the "soda straw."
Nowadays, staffing is a troubling challenge: it takes 19 analysts to study images and other data from one drone. In the future, a war could eliminate unemployment entirely: it will take approximately 2,00 men and women to process information from one drone equipped with "Gorgon stare" optics capable of scanning an entire city at once.
There's also a huge gap in education, experience and culture. Virtual warriors require simple rules that don't apply when trying to kill jihadis. At the beginning of the US war against Afghanistan in 2001, for example, it was an article of faith within the Pentagon that men wearing black long-tailed turbans were Talibs.
Dozens, possibly hundreds, of noncombatants were killed because of this incorrect assumption. In February 2002 a drone operator blew up a man because he was tall - as was Osama bin Laden. In fact, he and two other men killed were poor villagers gathering scrap metal. Again, this doesn't address the broader issue of whether it's okay to murder people simply because they are members of the Taliban.
Unlike the wedding parties, houses and tribal councils that have been mistakenly incinerated by the aptly-named Hellfire missiles, Taliban bike gangs are easy to identify from the air. One or two hundred dirtbikes speeding across the desert toward a truck on an Afghan highway are unmistakable. Most Afghans, even those who oppose the US occupation, fear the Talibikers and resent being robbed at impromptu checkpoints. There have been a few scattershot drone strikes, nothing more. Why don't the CIA whiz kids make these easily-identified fighters a primary target?
Afghans a low priority for US
I posed the question to Afghan government officials. They told me that the same US military that blows $1 billion a week on the war won't lift a finger to save Afghan lives by providing basic security. "Afghan lives are worth nothing to the Americans," a provincial governor told me.
Last week the United Nations announced that civilian casualties were up 15 percent during the first six months of 2011. If the same rate continues, this will be the worst year of the ten-year-long American occupation.
A well-placed US military source confirms that Afghan security "isn't a priority, it isn't even much of a passing thought". Contrary to President Obama's claim that US is in Afghanistan in order to prevent the country from becoming a base for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups and to combat opium cultivation, he says that Afghanistan isn't about Afghanistan at all. "Afghanistan is a staging area for drone and other aerial strikes in western Pakistan," he says. "Nothing more, nothing less. Afghanistan is Bagram [airbase]."
Under Obama the death toll has risen, worsening relations between the White House and its puppet president, Hamid Karzai. Beyond the horror of the deaths themselves, it would be impossible to overstate the contempt that ordinary people in nations like Afghanistan and Pakistan feel for the drone program. "Americans are cowards" was one refrain I heard last year. Real soldiers risk their lives. They do not send buzzing machines to kill people half a world away…people they know nothing about.
And what does the future hold? The micro-drone.
Back in 2002, former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith worried about blowback. "If [Taliban leaders and soldiers are] dead, they're not talking to you, and you create more martyrs," he noted. Ongoing drone attacks "suggest that it's acceptable behavior to assassinate people…Assassination as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas."
These days, the media gives little to no time or space to such concerns. Americans have moved into postmorality. Right or wrong? Who cares?
Recently international law professor Mary Ellen O'Connell of Notre Dame University said that the new reliance on drones could prompt an already militaristic superpower to fight even more wars of choice. "I think this idea that somehow this technology is allowing us to kill in more places and ... aim at more targets is for me the fundamental ethical and legal problem."
Meanwhile, adds Mary Dudziak of the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law: "Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on…endless war." No casualties? No problem.
Meanwhile, at a "microaviary" inside an air force base north of Dayton, Ohio, "military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds", approvingly reports The New York Times.
• Ted Rall is an American political cartoonist, columnist and author. His website is rall.com.
• For articles and data on US drone strikes, see the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
